This post started out as a SIGGRAPH 2011 wrap up, but has since turned into a memoir of sorts about my friends and family inside of the ACM SIGGRAPH organization. I have separated these out into different posts I will be publishing over the next few days. Here is a link to Part 1. Here is a link to Part 2.Here is a link to Part 3. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. – Jeremy Photos by Adam Blair.

So SIGGRAPH 2011 has finally ended and I’m back at home in sunny San Antonio after about 3 hours of sleep. Had a bit of an airport / flight scheduling catastrophe which put me in SA about 12 hours after I had expected. CLASSIC US Airways. Although I have to admit I was impressed that my luggage had arrived when I landed at SAT, and to be fair the US Airways employee who helped me out at Sky Harbor was very polite and accommodating.

Vancouver was an amazing venue and I’m pretty sure SIGGRAPH will be heading back soon. According to Business Wire SIGGRAPH 2011 was Vancouver’s largest convention ever. I’m sure there were a number of factors behind the scenes that I don’t know about, but the biggest worth mentioning was definitely the involvement of the Vancouver SIGGRAPH Chapter. Holy crap. They were everywhere and anywhere helping to promote the conference and increase attendance. It’s almost like they had some sort of interest in this being successful. Kudos to everyone involved with the Vancouver chapter, excellent work!

As for my involvement this year, I was working with the SIGGRAPH Student Volunteer Program as the Head of Industry Relations and Outreach. I’ll get to what that job entails in another post, but suffice to say it reeks of awesomeness. In that post I’ll also give some quick background about SIGGRAPH and the Student Volunteer Program in general.

The first day of SIGGRAPH I helped organize a talk with Karen Moltenbrey, Chief Editor of Computer Graphics World. Karen invited several industry professionals to come and speak to our army of Student Volunteers about how they got where they are, and some of the things they’ve learned along the way. As a quick side note – I consider Karen a friend and a bit of a personal mentor to me, and I can’t say enough about how wonderful she is. Anyway – the panel included Greg Butler (Moving Picture Company), Troy Brooks (Digital Domain), Jason Dowdeswell (Image Engine), and Matt Ward (Rainmaker). They covered everything from the relationships they’ve built at SIGGRAPH, to their experiences working with each other at other companies like ILM, and finally to how 3D (stereo) is dead (Good because I didn’t wanna buy one of those TV’s anyway). Another thing I found particularly awesome was how confident they were in Vancouver’s film/tv/FX industry. Vancouver is a super happening spot right now! Autodesk’s Jennifer Goldfinch also gave a quick intro about some of the things Autodesk would be offering throughout the week. If you’re lucky enough to know Jennifer you know how passionate she is about giving back and helping the industry’s new talent as much as possible.

One of the hottest early venues this year was the Studio, a place where attendees can go and play with software, hardware, toys, and other cool stuff hands on! I saw lenticulars being made, 3D models being printed, games being developed in Unity, and lectures being given all in a single giant room. It was really neat to watch the vibe and atmosphere in there. Of the lectures, a colleague and close friend of mine, Zeb Wood, presented in The Studio about Real World Camera Rigs inside of Maya. I didn’t get a chance to catch the whole talk, but I’m totally trying to figure out a way to get him down here to present it to the local university! Zeb is a professor at the Art Institute of Indiana and one of the founders of Indiana Uploaded. In addition to Zeb, I also saw Newtek’s Graham Toms would be presenting later in the week… unfortunately I found out he wasn’t able to make it. Too bad really – I know he would have blown people away! We missed you Graham – maybe next year?

Right next to The Studio was the Art Gallery and Emerging Technologies. As usual, both were fantastic. E-Tech (as it’s more commonly known) had some amazing technology this year, some of them being a pregnancy suit, a water visualization device from Walt Disney Imagineering, and a laser hologram device I would describe as a Star Wars Princess Leia machine. Hands down though, the coolest presentation was from IDEEALab who presented PocoPoco. It was a musical interface device that allowed users to create music from turning, twisting, pressing, and holding 16 buttons on a small grid. It’s really way too hard to describe with any integrity – just watch this [video]. I stood there for at least 30 minutes watching these guys perform. Simply amazing.

I can’t talk much about the Technical Papers because they are a bit over my head. Actually in full disclosure they are WAY over my head. I’ll typically attend the Papers Fast Forward as the last 4 SIGGRAPH’s I’ve been involved in helping put it together in one way or another, but beyond those comedic 1 minute performances I tend to steer more towards the Sketches, Courses, and Talks.

One of my favorites was the Sketch from Texas A&M’s Department of Visualization and Dreamworks Animation SKG. The premise was simple – Dreamworks would sponsor artists to come and speak to TAMU students for a week at a time for the length of time the course was being taught. Students were in groups of 5 and responsible for producing a short film based on certain guidelines set by the course and the Dreamworks artists and animators. The results were fantastic, but according to TAMU the process was what really shined, and I believe them. As an educator who has taught the spectrum of 3D animation and game design courses at the University level, this type of class is a dream. To have a big studio showing up and basically saying, “This is what we’re looking for when we hire you, do it this way” is priceless. On the Dreamworks side, when I saw the names Jim Conrads and Marilyn Friedman – the Dreamworks Outreach overlords, I wasn’t surprised they were involved. These 2 are consistently finding ways to give to students and help people get a foot in the door in the industry. I’ve worked with both of them during my tenure as Industry Relations and Outreach Coordinator on the SV Committee, and people like them are few and far between. They are losing sleep to help us organize, skipping lunch to give us studio tours, and dodging flights to talk to our SV’s onsite at SIGGRAPH. A truly sincere and heartfelt thanks to both of them.

The Keynote this year was given by Cory Doctorow. A quick bio; Cory is a Canadian science fiction writer who has sort of championed copyright law and is a proponent of the Creative Commons organization. His main message was how copyright does nothing to serve content creators. In the current ecosystem, content creators have no authority over how their work is owned, distributed, or redistributed. All of that power lies with publishers and other entities like iTunes and the AppStore. It probably doesn’t do it any justice to try to describe it to you, you can hear it from the man himself below.

Other topics covered were things like how Disney handled hair and water in Tangled. Some of the technology behind Rapunzel’s hair was based on some r&d done on Bolt back in 2008. They also talked about the water sequence after escaping from the Snuggly Duckling and breaking the dam loose. Impressive stuff. And for the record, Tangled is one of my favorite 3D films to date.

Dreamworks gave a lot of insight into various parts of making Kung Fu Panda 2. I have yet to see the film but it looks nothing short of amazing. Rob Vogt came and spoke about the approach to rigging Lord Shen’s tail which I found particularly fun. The PDF’s of these sketches are available on the SIGGRAPH Full Conference DVD by the way incase you grabbed one. If not you can find them here.

Dreamworks had two other very interesting talks about how they produced cities in Megamind and Panda 2. Using the same technology behind Procedural’s City Engine, they were able to build entire cities and make them look completely fantastic. Here at Geomedia we’ve been playing around with the CityEngine technology and we were floored by just the demo scripts and rules!! I can’t imagine seeing how the pipeline worked over there at PDI/Dreamworks. Imagine setting up rules, laws, frameworks, etc., and after drawing some roads having a fully populated city! That’s sort of what CityEngine does. It’s a very unique piece of software and also started as a SIGGRAPH paper back in 2001!

Finally, Pixar had several awesome presentations about how they lit vehicles in Cars 2. The write ups on the DVDs for those are great if you can snag one. They also talked about the Ocean Mission in Cars 2, and how they created the water surface and interaction, as well as their approach to lighting it with volumetrics.

Ok, I have a confession to make. I actually missed the Electronic Theater this year. I was so busy between working with all my buddies up in the SV Office, swapping shifts for Student Volunteers, trying to make sure I secured Autodesk party tickets, and taking 20 minute boost naps that I never got a chance to catch it. I saw parts of the CAF and it was impressive so I can’t imagine how good ET must have been. If you missed it as well, make sure you pick it up on DVD!!!

Finally – the Exhibition Floor. There was a lot of different things going on this year, and a few noticeable absenses. Newtek and Lightwave were nowhere to be found, something I thought strange after their awesome performance with Lightwave 10 last year. Maybe they’re still coasting off all that success. As a fellow San Antonio company we wish them nothing but the best!

I noticed several studio absences from the show floor, and many of them had relocated to the job fair. I’m sure the rent is cheaper there, and most of them are only taking demo reels and looking for new talent anyway. Companies like Pixar though who still have services and products like Renderman were definitely visible. And of course, they can’t handle a 2000 person teapot line in the job fair anyway.

Speaking of the teapot, this years generic teapot was particularly cool. Sporting a race helmet and flames this thing was made to move! I’ve heard stories about the Renderman version having a Canadian flag on the top, although I have yet to see it. I managed to snag 2 on different days, but gave the second away to a friend. Also handed out this year was a really great double printed Cars 2 poster. I swear one of these days I’m going to go into my closet and pull out all 20 Pixar poster tubes I’ve got in there and get them properly framed. I just cant bring myself to tacking them to the wall.

There’s no way I could possibly tell all the awesome happenings in Vancouver this year, and probably no way I should tell everything either! Make sure you’re in Los Angeles next year and join the family!! I’m home!

When Geomedia talks about lights, “2K”, “HMI” and “Kino Flo” are terms you are likely to hear. But “City Lights” is a new one to us and we love it. We now have new, energy efficient lights installed throughout our building. The process was simple, the installers worked around our crazy schedule, and we are now saving over 50 percent off our previous lighting bills. The best part… CPS picked up most of the bill!

Check out the City of San Antonio website and sign up!

Visit EnerPath to set up your site survey.

Thanks to CPS and EnerPath for helping us go green.

They say good things come in threes, but we ‘one-upped’-'em with our FOUR varieties of GeoBrau homebrew. We’ve had wonderful feedback from those who have had the chance to try it (*phew*…), so…

For those who have been following along, our last beer post left off after the fermentation process had begun on our Porter brew. We repeated the same process for our Brown Ale, Red Ale, and Witbier. After about ten days in the fermentation bucket, each brew was ‘racked’ (i.e. transferred while filtering out the spent yeast) into our bottling bucket, and priming sugar was added, which would create carbonation within approximately 7-10 days. From there, we used a special siphon with a push pin at the bottom to carefully fill each thoroughly sanitized bottle.

After capping every last bottle, we applied the expertly-designed labels for each specific brew. Here’s Rudy going through the painstakingly ‘piddly’ process of symmetrically sticking on labels:

By then, our beer was starting to look like beer! Not only did we have labels for our bottles, but we also had a GeoBrau ‘crest’ to add to the side of each GeoBrau 4-pack carrier.

Now that we had proper packaging, we needed something to complete our creation–an additional edible to make for a GeoBrau ‘experience’, not just a pack of beer with a greeting card. And what better beer snack is there than good old fashioned soft pretzels! Thanks to some kind folks at a local pretzel-making company, we were able to get piles of fresh-baked pretzels to bundle individually for each pack of beer. Here’s a candid shot of Martin and Brenna bringing out their inner Martha Stewart:

Once our pretzel bundles were wrapped and bagged, we attached a Geomedia bar key, and voila! Our GeoBrau holiday gift packages were complete! Of course, the only thing left to do was take one for the team and be the GeoBrau guinea pigs….

…It’s a tough life, sometimes…

Salud, San Antonio! Cheers and Happy Holidays!

We all knew it would happen. The year sneakily passes by, and before we know it–BOOM! The holiday season is upon us. We made our list and checked it twice, and decided that– naughty or nice–everyone can use a cold one, right?

Grandma always said, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” But we here at Geomedia interpreted that as something more along the lines of, “When life gives you lemons…or a need for holiday gift ideas….leave grandma with her lemonade and make beer, instead”.

With the help of our friends at Home Brew Party.com, we did just that. We ambitiously decided that one variety of home brew would surely never be enough. So we upped the ante and picked four; a porter (a custom recipe from the store’s owner, Bret), a brown ale, a red ale, and a witbier.

Not only are we brewing and bottling, but also labeling. Rudy Martinez, in collaboration with Martin Jaeger (our resident Beer Bottle Label Creators), came up with four distinct designs that reflect the characteristics of our four different brews. Here’s one of them:

Our homemade brews are currently fermenting away, but here is a step by step description of how the process works (using our porter as the example).
There’s a lot of info here, so try and keep up….

We started by filling a cheesecloth with the necessary grains, and brought approximately 2 gallons of water to a boil. We then removed it from the heat, and added our grains to steep for approximately 30 minutes. After our grains had steeped, we added our malt extract and brought the concoction to a boil once again. At this point in the process, our beer ‘base’ is called wört.

Once the wört began to boil, we added our bittering hops, followed by our flavoring hops at minute 45, followed by our aroma hops at minute 55. We also added a clarifying agent (in this case, Irish Moss). After 60 minutes of boiling, we removed our wört from the heat and cooled it to approximately 80 degrees. This was done by halfway submerging our brew pot in ice water until we reached room temperature. We then poured our wört over a filter bag into our freshly sanitized fermenting bucket with a small amount of water in it already, to help mix our wört more thoroughly.

We carefully (with sanitized hands…and a sanitized filter bag…and sanitized everything, really) rotated our filter bag back and forth to allow the wört to pass through, leaving our hops behind. We then added water up to the 5 gallon line on our fermenting bucket, and added the yeast. Or, as the pro’s call it, “pitched the yeast”. We then sealed our bucket with it’s sanitized lid and put our bubbling airlock in place; this device bubbles as the yeast eats away at the sugar in our wört and creates alcohol.

Now we play the waiting game for 7 or 8 days (9 or 10 for the porter, specifically…darker beers sometimes can use the extra time to ferment)–then ‘rack’ our beer, a.k.a. transfer from our fermenting bucket to a new bottling bucket using a very scientific-looking hose/ siphoning device. This process also decreases the amount of sediment in our beer. We’ll then add priming sugar and bottle our brew. About a week later we’ll have tasty, carbonated, homemade GeoBrau.

Updates to come!

This is the first in a special series of posts from Geomedia 3D Artist Jeremy Kenisky who is blogging for us from SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 in Singapore.

So I’ve been here in Singapore for about 14 hours now and thought I’d write something about my initial culture shock and adventures so far.

While this isn’t specifically production or animation related I thought it still might be fun to read.

The first thing I noticed last night was that everything here is backwards. The cars drive on the wrong side of the road and if you want to move out of someones way on the fastwalk systems at the airport, you should move to the left.

I arrived last night at around 1:30AM to my “hotel”. Hotel turned out to be a hostel and for some reason my name wasn’t on the guest list. A few quick phone calls later I managed to get in touch with one of the SIGGRAPH guys and they got me in. So I walk up to my room and there are 5 other guys in there all asleep – not only were they strangers but they weren’t a part of SIGGRAPH either. I went to sleep at around 2:00AM after trying to put all of my stuff away in complete darkness. I thought turning on the lights would be rude, but after banging stuff around because I couldn’t see I probably just trumped that idea anyway.

After sleeping for what I thought was about 6-7 hours, someone else in the room turned the light on and I could see out our window that the sun was starting to come up. This other guy was getting dressed and leaving, so I figured I’d jump out of bed too and head downstairs to check my email and see any students had emailed me in the last few days since I wasn’t able to check since I left San Antonio. I walk downstairs and the clerk informs me that I should “get some sleepy time”, because it was only 3:00AM. I had been asleep for less than an hour. I’m having a hard time adjusting to the time differences but I was finally able to get a few more hours of sleep before getting up again at around 7:30AM.

Today (Dec7) is sort of a free day for me, I’m supposed to be catching up on jetlag but I’m not tired so I figured I’d go check out the shopping malls and market places.

A lot of things are cheaper here. There is a place called Sim Lim Square that is essentially the electronics Mecca of the island. 6 Floors of every single electronic device you can imagine, and then some. Before leaving I was talking with Troy about different lenses for a Canon DSLR I recently acquired. I’m not sure how the guys at Sim Lim compete because it seems like every other vendor has tons of Canon lenses at pretty good prices. So after haggling with a few vendors, I was able to track down a 50mm/f1.8 lens, uv and polarizer, battery charger, and a lens cleaning kit for what was essentially $65-$70 USD. I’m not sure why everything seems so much cheaper, but I guess when it breaks in a week I’ll know why.

I also managed to find a mall here that is open 24 hours. It’s different. A mall has groceries on one floor, toys on another, jewelry on another, and traditional cultural wear on another. One thing I noticed is that everywhere I went was very cramped. The aisles are very close together and it’s hard for 2 people to walk side by side in them. It didn’t help that I was carrying my “look at that stupid tourist” camera bag around, but I figured getting some fun pictures would be worth it.

The smell here is very different. Different places have a strong what I would call “Indian” spicy smell. It smells very good and they often play complementary music and it really creates a great atmosphere. Other places have different smells and other types of music and together you really get a sense that you really are on the other side of the world. I’ve really enjoyed just walking through the local neighborhoods and shops and taking it in. Even the architecture of the buildings (at least where I’m staying) is very different. You see movies like The Bourne Ultimatum and you see him running through a busy street in Lebanon, and the atmosphere seems similar here. There is a huge mix of culture here and it is different from what I expected.

I’m still trying to figure out how the SIM cards and wall outlets and internet connections work here but I’m surviving. This is definitely one of the most different things I’ve ever experienced but so far it’s been great. I’m looking forward to tonight to see the city really light up.

Hopefully I’ll get some actual CG related stuff up soon, but for today this will have to do.

Also, I’ve uploaded a few pictures to http://www.kenisky.com/singapore/